As a mentor of mine often says, “If you’re not tooting your own horn there is no music!” Those whose livelihoods depend on externally focused relationships such as business development professionals, all understand the power of reference selling.  In any economy there is an enormous level of comfort in a buyer’s journey when they get unsolicited recommendations from other satisfied buyers – it’s simply called “credibility by association.”

Read the rest of this entry »

When you’re a candidate for a promotion that ends up going to a peer, are you left wondering “why them and not me?”  Why were they promoted to manage or lead a broader realm of responsibilities, but not me? Why when I am the one who is more consistently and more recently invited to spend time with the boss, are they the one receiving the promotion?

Read the rest of this entry »

The prevalence of LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, and a host of other social networking tools has certainly raised awareness for personal relationship development and social networking best practices. When the use of the same social interaction functionality is brought into an organization to manage client or customer interactions and partner or supplier engagement in order to enable and manage collaboration within your organization, the mindset becomes one of Enterprise 2.0.

Read the rest of this entry »

This is from Tim Fulton’s always interesting Small Business Matters newsletter:

• Fairchild Electronics and Honeywell Computers are now Fairwell Honeychild
• Polygram Records, Warner Brothers and Keebler are now Poly-Warner-Cracker
• 3M and Goodyear are now mmmGood
• John Deere and Abitibi-Price are now Deere Abi
• Honeywell, Imasco, and Home Oil are now Honey, I’m Home
• Denison Mines, Alliance, and Metal Mining are now Mine, All Mine
• Knott’s Berry Farm and National Organization of Women are now Knott NOW!
• Zippo Manufacturing, Audi, Dofasco, Dakota Mining are now Zip Audi Do-Da